Técnicas citogenéticas

The tradition of rescue by a machine-borne God is as old as classical Greek tragedy where desperate and disconsolate heroes are borne away by sympathetic deities in chariots literally suspended from cranes. 133 Greek audiences then were quite accepting of the idea of the 'ghost in the machine' and were equally comfortable with the notion that temporal problems could be solved by the sudden intervention of mobile Gods. However, whilst for Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the Deus was a legitimate and often imperative mechanism for the resolution of plots, Forster and Fitzgerald tend to satirise the convention. In Fitzgerald's 'The Diamond', for example, the divine machine takes John Unger and Percy Washington away from the world of ordinary mortals and into a mechanised heaven. However, it is a dream world which ultimately breaks down when the real world smashes through its fantastic defences.

In Gatsby, in a much more subtle representation of the tradition, the hero uses his Rolls-Royce to spirit Daisy away from the temporal consequences of her carelessness whilst in This Side of Paradise the 'shining green auto-bus' dreamed of by the hero is one of two foreshadowings of Amory's rescue Deus ex machina at the end of the novel - the other being his flight of poetic fancy concerning Miss Connage. 134 Toward the end of This Side of Paradise, having had his name published for improper sexual connection, having lost his girl to the wealthy, reliable, and boring J. Dawson Ryder, and having been informed that his income from his mother's failed speculation in the street-car market is to cease, a disconsolate Amory Blaine wanders the streets and contemplates his miseries. It is here, within fifty miles of Manhattan, that a passing motor-car slows down beside the shambling figure. Amory looks up to behold 'a magnificent Locomobile' and is hailed by one of the two anonymous, begoggled, and otherwise dehumanised figures inside. These Gods of the machine then drive Amory West, in the direction of hope, as one of its occupants indicates with a 'sweeping, lateral gesture. ' (257) However, rather than being representations of God's mercy, manifestations of the Deus in Fitzgerald's fictions tend to underscore the notion of flight from obligation or flight from the essential self - the former identified by Sachs as a motif we might find in all sorts of texts.

In Forster's fiction the Deus figures quite traditionally in the short story 'The Celestial Omnibus' in which a young man and his father's friend, Mr Bons, are taken from a dreary life in Surbiton for a ride to heaven by a terse and rather ghostly driver by the name of S� Thomas Browne - the English physician and writer. Due to his lack of imagination, Bons does not survive the journey, but the boy, rewarded for his humility and his belief in the spirit of poetry, is crowned with a garland. Here then, the Deus rescues the lad from the cynicism and cruelty of the adult world. Of course the device also finds expression in

A Passage where Nancy Derek's car twice comes out of nowhere to rescue characters from disaster: once at the portentous scene of the motor-accident on the Marabar Road and again below the Marabar caves themselves when Adela Quested is 'rescued' from her 'ordeal' . 135 But here, as in Howards End when Charles Wilcox drives away from the scene of Leonard Bast's death, the Deus tradition loses its classical

associations of rescue, relief, and release to take on the more dubious suggestions of flight from responsibility and moral imperative.

Only a thoroughgoing surface reading of Forster' s and Fitzgerald' s fictions then may foreground the motor-car as a sign of unequivocal conquest. But the question begged is this: 'To what extent may such a reading be considered legitimate?' The answer must be that the exercising of a singular approach to any text may be sanctioned only inasmuch as violence (that is to say the pedantic application of a tortuous logic) is resisted. With respect to technology then, whilst the approbatory voice of the 'other' may undoubtedly be heard in the fictions of Forster and Fitzgerald, it is a voice that nonetheless fails to drown out the cries of caution, negativity, and condemnation which consistently and authoritatively assert themselves in their texts. All this points more firmly to something that has been variously suggested in the first half of this thesis: that is, by privileging the post-modernist surface model, one denies these latter voices their due.

Such a denial also amounts to a complete rejection of depth­ models such as literary structuralism, existentialism, dialecticism, and psychoanalysis. Moreover, as noted earlier, whilst the application of late-capital modes of analysis to mid-capital texts may be rewarding, and even revealing, a myopic adherence to deconstruction would appear to be unreasonably out of step with an increasingly hostile response to modem technology from about 1 9 1 0 on. Notwithstanding this, and as has been suggested above, it will be seen that authors do have what may be said to be a somewhat ambivalent view of technology. It is an ambivalence that can certainly be foregrounded through the application of literary structuralism and accordingly, it is to the motor-car as a sign of servitude, broken connections, and death that the second, and inevitably longer, part of this study turns its attentions.

Before so turning to part two of Narratives of Conquest and

Destruction however, we must bear in mind that it is in the nature of oppositions to dissolve into paradox. Therefore, while it will become clear that both Forster and Fitzgerald are heavily critical of the motor­ car and motorists, it will also be seen that they are not unequivocally

emblematic of that of many modem writers who foreground automobiles in their work, we cannot quite forget that the death-car is also a dream-car; a sign of what might have been were it not for the profoundly human propensity to worship the material thing. Of course, this interpretation in itself reveals yet another level of paradox: that the object of our desire will kill us in the end. And so, as was noted in the introduction to this thesis, a limited level of textual deconstruction may be defended as both functional and desirable.

PART 2: